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Greenline commission piped cattle slurry-to-gas grid plant

Bioenergy International

Biogas

July 4, 2017

Greenline GmbH & Co. KG has announced that it has commissioned one of Germany's largest biogas plant expansions and upgrades. The new revamped 8.5 MW biogas plant takes cattle slurry via a pipeline and injects the biomethane into a regional gas grid.

With a ten-fold capacity expansion, the biogas is now upgraded to biomethane and injected into the regional grid (photo courtesy Greenline).

Germany-based Greenline GmbH & Co. KG, an engineering company specialised in designing, planning and construction of anaerobic digestion (AD) and gas utilisation plants has announced that the 8.5 MW biogas plant in Vettin, Groß Pankow went into regular operation in April 2017. The plant is operated by the biogas division of Osters & Voß GmbH, one of Germany’s largest agricultural contractors.

Building on the existing 800 kW biogas site commissioned in 2014, the plant has been expanded ten-fold and uses a mix of cattle slurry, cattle manure and maize silage. Three fermenters and two secondary fermenters with a fermenting volume of around 23 000 m3 in total have been installed at the biogas plant as well as six digestate storage tanks with a total holding capacity of around 42 000 m3.

Slurry pipeline

The raw biogas is upgraded into biomethane using “physio-organic” washing processes and then fed into the regional gas grid network of the Brandenburg utility company, E.ON-E.DIS. On an annual basis, the expanded plant now processes approximately 70 000 tonnes of slurry, 50 000 tonnes of maize silage, and 7 000 tonnes of solid manure.

The slurry is pumped via a 2 km pipeline from a dairy farm directly to the biogas plant. In turn, around 75 GWh of gas and heat are generated from these materials.

With this layout, this biogas plant ranks among the largest in Germany in tank volume and gas production, particularly setting functional and operational benchmarks, noted Frank Nielsen, Managing Director of Greenline.

According to Nielsen, high quality, low production and operational costs, and a high degree of automation in new construction and flexibilization in projects are all helping to establish biogas production as the standard energy alternative in the German renewable energy market going forward. In particular, thanks to the latest EEG amendment and the modified framework conditions for approval, efficient planning concepts and low building costs are fundamental to the chances of executing biogas projects.

Furthermore, AD plants for overseas markets with carbon dioxide (CO2) certificates are becoming increasingly more important. Here too, competitive kWh generation costs throughout the operational period play a decisive role.